(The following article is from the April 16-30,  2010 issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $30/year, or $15 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $45 US per year; other overseas readers - $45 US or $50 CDN per year. Send to: People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 706 Clark Drive, Vancouver, BC, V5L 3J1.)

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the first Earth Day, held on April 22, 1970 in the United States. But despite an enormous growth in global awareness of environmental issues, the threat of ecological disaster is ever greater. We reprint here an excerpt from the Main Resolution adopted by the recent 36th Central Convention of the Communist Party of Canada, dealing with the urgent topic of climate change:

     Imperialism's efforts to stymie talks at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the post-Kyoto Protocol negotiations deserve special attention. Imperialist countries have generated billions in profits from industrial production creating historic levels of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the last two decades. GHG emissions are actually accelerating. But in what might be described as "carbon neocolonialism", imperialism is trying to force the burden of addressing climate change onto the working people and Third World countries, restricting development while refusing to fund sustainable and renewable energy technology.

     These efforts reflect a marked shift in the public policy debate on climate change. Capital has generally replaced its tactic of denying human-caused global warming with efforts to co-opt or hijack climate solutions. For example, the European Union's Emission Trading System has revealed the cap and trade approach to be a `polluter profits', not `polluter pays' solution. Similar approaches are being advanced in North America, with the Chicago Climate Exchange, Obama's model, and the Western Climate Initiative. Business is making profits selling offsets or Clean Development Mechanisms like planting trees, which are also ineffective. As the recent Delhi Declaration of the Workers and Communist parties said, "Capitalism's proposal for restructuring in the name of climate change has little relation to the protection of the environment. Corporate inspired `green development' and [the] `green economy' are sought to be used to impose new state monopoly regulations which support profit maximisation and impose new hardships on the people."

     Canada is the second-highest per capita producer of Green House Gasses (GHG) in the world. The major contributions come not from the people but rather from business, especially the Alberta Tar Sands, while the military is also a major GHG producer. Canada will also suffer severe consequences from rising temperatures including destruction of boreal forests and agriculture, coastal flooding, devastating impacts on water resources and fisheries, as well as transport and health; events internationally could be catastrophic. Hardest hit will be aboriginal, working class, poor and racialized communities.

     Despite this rapidly deteriorating situation, successive governments have blocked even modest reforms. Liberal governments have supported intensity-based emission targets, while the policies of the Harper Conservatives have been unabashedly drafted by their corporate patrons in the resource industry, which resulted in the retrograde role that Canada played in negotiations leading up to the Copenhagen Meeting in December 2009.

     The urgent need to stop and reverse global warming calls for a bold emergency response. In fact, the effects that the Kyoto Protocol was supposed to prevent have already begun. Emission reduction targets must be significantly increased if the accelerating rate of global warming is to be arrested and reversed. It is time to `pay the climate bill' - the debt or reparations owed to the oppressed peoples, nations and countries of the world, a view supported by the UN Framework on Climate change - and make deep cuts to GHG emissions in imperialist countries. Mitigation efforts including climate change agreements must be strong, legally binding, comprehensive, and audacious, and be based on international solidarity, peace and respect for sovereignty, self-determination and democracy, as well as employment and social progress.

     There is no other alternative. The nightmarish so-called "Plan B" responses that some military researchers as well as NASA and the British Royal Society are investigating in case other efforts fail - geo-engineering technologies like simulating a volcanic eruption, or use of nuclear bombs as stop-gap measures - must be categorically rejected.

     Today, environmental activism is more urgent than ever. But as our Program states: "Environmental reforms alone cannot stop the general trend of environmental degradation... Capital has never fully accepted infringements on its private ownership and `right' to exploit. Neither the transnational corporations, nor capitalists as a whole are capable of solving the environmental crisis. Only socialism can put the environment ahead of profit. Only with socialism will humanity begin scientifically to address the far-reaching social and environmental effects of our impact on nature, and do away with capitalism's unplanned, anarchic destruction of the natural environment."